Though I think I saw a murmer about the AF hit being worse than GT200, somewhere on some random page in some random review.
You mean this one?
http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/...geforce_gtx_480/5/#abschnitt_skalierungstests
Anyone seen an "official" figure for GF100's die size, by the way? Anyone taken the lid off to measure?
I think some reviews quoted the 529mm^2 figure, originating from here I guess:
http://www.nordichardware.com/en/news/71-graphics/10909-geforce-fermi-die-measures-529-mm2-.html
Actually, I think I need to revisit my opinion about the fermi architecture a bit. I think it's got potential, and it in fact did improve in terms of perf/area vs. competition quite a bit (now I'd argue it's more due to bad scaling from rv770 to rv870 but still), though not closing the gap. But the chip is just too flawed to take any advantage of this (way late, no full configuration, low (mem) clock, terrible power consumption).
Some random thoughts for that theory:
- GTX285 and GTX480 have about a similar lead over the top (single) AMD cards on average (HD4890 and HD5870 respectively) - though GTX480 is very close in a lot of titles, never really loses by much and sometimes is quite a bit faster. And it would be better with full configuration, obviously.
- Die size difference is smaller in percentage (going by the 529mm^2 figure):
282mm^2 (rv790), 480mm^2 (gt200b, 70% larger) vs. 330mm^2 (rv870), 529mm^2 (gf100, 60% larger).
But the implementation of the chip is just too broken for the cards to really be considered good.
More random thoughts:
- AMD doubled its units, transistor count from HD4890 to HD5870 going from 55nm to 40nm, keeping clocks the same - and more importantly, (load) power draw is pretty much the same too.
- NVIDIA basically doubled its units (well not exactly but you get the idea) and transistor count from GTX285 to GTX480 going from 55nm to 40nm, keeping clocks (which were already a lot lower than on g92b) roughly the same (bit lower actually) - and nearly doubling power draw.
So I have to agree with Jawed, might be better to judge the architecture based on Fermi derivatives (GF104) or at least that B1 respin. Though I think Juniper is actually a tougher opponent to beat in the perf/area department than Cypress, still things might not get too ugly for nvidia if those derivatives don't suffer from the same problems... Well if they appear before N.I that is...